May 12, 2025: In 2024 Ukraine used HIMARS missiles equipped with cluster munitions. Each 300 kg missile contains 644 submunitions. When a submunition explodes, it will wound or kill anyone within three or four meters. One cluster missile warhead will kill or injure anyone in a roughly circular area of 30,000 square meters (@173 meters across).

In 2023 the U.S. decided to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. In late 2017 the U.S. decided to reverse a 2008 decision to phase out the use of cluster munitions by 2019 and that meant the weapons were available to Ukraine in 2023.

Cluster bombs are a technology developed sixty years ago. In the 1990s they were declared obsolete because of GPS guided smart bombs and bad publicity. During the Vietnam War Cluster bombs were usually a one thousand pound bomb that released up to 200 or more smaller bomblets. About 285 million bomblets were dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the war. The cluster bombs ability to cover a large area with lethal bomblets had great appeal to the air force. Unfortunately about five percent of the bomblets did not detonate. If they were delayed action bomblets, they did not self-destruct when they were supposed to. This meant that there were at least 14 million of these bomblets lying around. Many, no one is sure how many, were really duds. But others would, if handled, explode, killing or maiming whoever was nearby.

There have always been dud munitions, be they bombs, shells, mines or hand grenades. These lethal duds are still being encountered after being used in wars over a century ago. But the 20th century put the most dud munitions into the ground. The problem with cluster munitions, which are now used in artillery shells and rockets as well, is that there are more of them. These bomblets are on the surface rather than buried like dud bombs and shells. They are smaller, harder to spot, and easier for children to pick up and turn into a lethal plaything.

You can reduce the dud rate to less than one percent, but this doubles the price of the bomblets and you still have duds out there. These dud bomblets are a risk to your own troops as well. After the 1991 Gulf War, over sixty coalition troops were killed or injured by dud bomblets. The trend is away from lots of bomblets, towards larger, smarter and more reliable submunitions. The SADARM submunition was used for the first time in Iraq and was very successful. This anti-vehicle weapon is delivered by artillery shell with two SADARM per 155mm shell. An MLRS missile carries six SADARM while a bomb contains a dozen or more SADARM.

But the army still likes cluster bombs because of their effectiveness against enemy troops and their cost. SADARM costs over a hundred times as much as a bomblet. But the downside of cluster bombs threatened to bring about their demise. Just like chemical weapons were dropped for psychological, not military, reasons, the same was expected to happen with cluster munitions.

It didn’t happen. While condemned and reviled in peacetime, every time a war breaks out the combatants want the most effective weapons and one of those is cluster munitions. In Ukraine, both sides use cluster munitions regularly. Ukraine has found the HIMARS missiles the most effective way to deliver cluster munitions.